Limiting Decisions
Limiting Decisions are at the core of how our dysfunctional patterns get formed. They are created when we are very young (usually before 7 or 8 years old) when something occurs that we can’t assimilate for one reason or another — perhaps it’s too intense or overwhelming, and we don’t have the conscious tools to make sense of it. So we get thrown into a state of chaos or confusion, a very uncomfortable state that most people try to get out of as quickly as they can. The conscious mind basically blows a fuse, it stops functioning, and the unconscious mind takes over.
Our unconscious mind then decides on a meaning for what we just saw, felt or heard, based on the amount of experience and development we have had up to that point in our young life. We might decide something like, “I’m ugly,” or “the world is a dangerous place,” or “I’m no good,” etc. Then the conscious mind takes back over, not realizing the unconscious mind has made a decision.
From that point on our experience of life is filtered through that unconscious decision, like an unconscious assumption about the nature of life. And we are very invested in proving that that decision is true, even though it is negative, because it represents a source of stability — so if something similar to that occurs, we think we know what it means. Some of the ways we keep proving it is true is by the way we interpret various events or situations in our life, and by the type of people and situations we are attracted to or attract to ourselves.
On the other hand, since it is a negative decision and it would be devastating if we really thought it was true, we avoid coming into present moment reality in that area of experience by developing defense systems to avoid it, so we never find out what the truth is. This is held in place by the unconscious mind, which is where the decision was made. This is why people do the same kind of dysfunctional behavior over and over again, or find themselves in the same dysfunctional situations or relationships, even when they know it isn’t good for them.
TimeLine Therapy is a fast and effective Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) technique for getting to the very first event in which that decision was made and clearing it.